But Thats the Way the Cookie Crumbles

Posted on May 13, 2008 by Mike Scott

Wouldn’t it be great…
If you only had to make one sale for a merchant and then every sale thereafter from that customer guaranteed to pay you commission every time, over and over again.

Most merchants tend to offer affiliates a 30 day cookie. This means that all transactions for a customer should be tracked under the same affiliate for the whole 30 day period.
In the real internet world however this doesn’t often happen the way it should do because cookies get crumbled.
Alot of merchants abide by a ‘last click wins’ policy - meaning that your tracking code can be possibly be overwritten at any time by someone elses tracking link. This then means that the customer you originally sent to the merchant website is now effectively ‘owned’ by another affiliate and they now get the money.
Also bear in mind that a customer may delete their cookies on their computer at any time which again means you lose out.

This should tell you couple of things:
Cookies aren’t as reliable as they should be
+ Don’t over rate the value of a long cookie - Some merchants offer 60, 90, 120 even 365 cookies.
I’m not saying that a cookie can’t last that long - some inevitably do - However in my opinion you should be looking at a merchants commission percentage with greater interest than the length of the cookie. This is worth much more value.
Your losing money because of flaws in the system

But…..
“Wouldn’t it be great, If you only had to make one sale for a merchant and then every sale thereafter for that customer guaranteed to pay you commission every time, over and over again.”

Well it can done because I can tell you that not every merchant uses cookies to track your sales and not all of them have any time restrictions on the period that you retain the customer.
Some merchants run in house affiliate programs and they they use there own tracking software that insures that you never lose the commission you deserve.

The downside is that these affiliate programs are hard to come by. I have seen less than 10.
You won’t find any programs like this on any affiliate networks as they all either use cookies and/or have a time restriction on your earnings.

Surely one of networks can step up to the mark and set-up programs in this way
I just hope we don’t have too wait much longer as affiliates have suffered enough and should not be losing any more money thats deservably theirs.

Thanks for reading
Mike

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3 Responses to “But Thats the Way the Cookie Crumbles”

  1. Jason Rakowski, on May 13th, 2008 at 8:28 pm Said:

    Good Layout and design. I like your blog. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. .

    Jason Rakowski

  2. hero, on May 17th, 2008 at 5:07 pm Said:

    Hi Mike,
    what you are looking for is customer ID tracking, whereby a customer, once they place an order, gets assigned an ID that ID is connected to the last referring affiliate. All consequent orders for that customer for a predefined period of time will be attributed to that affiliate. This period can even be lifetime. There are quite a few programs offering this type of tracking, not just in house ones, but through affiliate networks as well.

    However, this tracking is mainly used in specific sectors (gambling most notably). The reason retailers don’t really use it is because of the unfairness it presents. The customer, after the initial order, may well navigate through various channels/affiliates before they place follow-up orders. As the widely accepted tracking method is to reward the last affiliate, customer tracking negates that and prevents all those affiliates who help turn the customer into a returning customer from being rewarded.

    Furthermore, believe it or not, merchants use affiliates to acquire new customers. They are happy to pay on unlimited occurences for the customer within the defined cookie period, but at some point they will want to start owning the customer and stop paying a referring fee for all their orders. Lifetime commissions are therefore not the most usual approach, for retail let me clarify.

    Finally, as you appear to be disatisfied with cookie tracking - Webgains uses a variety of tracking methods, one of which is our unique cookieless tracking. With this method we can track approximately 8-10% more orders, which would otherwise be lost for affiliates. No tracking system is perfect and 100% accurate, but we try to come as close to that as possible.

    thanks very much
    Hero

  3. Mike Scott, on May 17th, 2008 at 6:13 pm Said:

    Hi Hero
    Thanks for your comments

    Yes I do think the cookie system is a little too shaky to say the least. ( Its just about had its day )

    I think affiliates are waking up fast to the fact that there is too much leakage and individual merchants and networks close behind are now catering for this by offering new tracking methods. Which can only be a good thing!

    I can only hope that more merchants will start to push the weight of the ‘ownership length’ as you mentioned or part of at least a little more in the affiliates direction. Our slice could do with being a little thicker on some occassion. But of course I would say that being an affiliate :)
    As this is happening more and more on inhouse programs. I guess its just a matter of time before the networks catch up.

    TBH I wasn’t aware that yourself and the guys at webgains offered this option as my main focus has been on the private programs.

    I’ll certainly be popping over and visiting you sometime soon and take a look at whats cooking.

    Thanks
    Mike

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